Epilogue: Reflections and Responses
Nevertheless, the slow but eventual emergence of the piece’s final structure thankfully resulted in some important longer-term discoveries and learning points for me, despite the many discomforts I encountered along the way (no doubt exacerbated by the trials of the coronavirus pandemic and some unconnected personal challenges during that period). As my longest work to date, the drawn-out process of slowly assembling such a large structure was a vividly unfamiliar and often unnerving experience for me. Even on a more mundane practical note, as my first orchestral work written in vocal score (for rehearsal reasons), I struggled with being unable to busy myself with local details of the orchestration, the sound of which was such an important part of my concept for the piece. Ultimately, however, facing down these challenges has left me with a newfound ability to notate orchestral music in reduced form, enabling me to aurally imagine (and physically see) much larger swathes of music in one go, and to have greater confidence in my intuitive perception of its narrative arc and underpinning harmonic structure. (Having worked in this way, the completion of the orchestration itself, once the vocal score had been submitted, was comparatively swift (taking only two months), with only the occasional need for minor corrections to the provisional vocal score.)
Crucially, I now feel a little more cognizant of the relationship between my intuition and technique, and through this project (and the use of similar methods to document my working process in my other recent narrative projects), recognize that experiencing tension between them is in fact an integral part of realizing my aims. I more readily accept that my creative work involves the interaction of both conscious and unconscious processes, much as the relationship between tacit, embodied, and explicit knowledge are considered crucial to other fields of artistic practice and P-R (see Nelson 2013: 37–47). Anticipating the dilemmas these two apparently conflicting impulses can cause might, I hope, permit me to find the creative process of writing larger works more comfortable in future.
Nonetheless, even with the more open sharing of some of the messiness of the creative process, I must still acknowledge the inherent danger, in any account of the completion of a large-scale research project, of the tendency toward a conventional heroic portrayal of the composer (even a quasi-Beethovenian one; see Goehr 1994: 205–42). Yet this would genuinely be a misrepresentation of my creative experiences. Owing to the drawn-out nature of the work, undertaken during a difficult time for so many, I would characterize the completion of the piece as far less of a ‘heroic return’ and much more a drawn-out accumulation of new artistic self-knowledge, which on some level, would seem to parallel the journey of the Jeweller himself, who likewise does not emerge victorious in a post-romantic sense. (Indeed, Pearl spends much of their interaction chastising him for his lack of faith in the Christian God’s salvation of the dead in the full-length poem. His inability to restrain his futile urges to ford the river and join her is perhaps testament to his fundamentally flawed character.) Thus the romantic image of the composer as the (sometimes even unwitting) recipient of divine inspiration, as critiqued by Lydia Goehr (1994) and many others (Born 2005; Leech-Wilkinson 2020, etc.), perhaps unsurprisingly bears little resemblance to mine, nor the Jeweller’s, experience. Moreover, laying aside the (inevitably limited) latter comparison, the familiar sense of gradual ‘problem accumulation’ leading to intense moments of creative ‘flow’, that I had encountered so frequently on other projects, never materialized in this case, however naively I had expected it to.1
In his book on Music and Inspiration, composer Jonathan Harvey reflects on the more complex ‘truth’ of the phenomenon of inspiration, describing in one example the ‘unconscious inspiration’ that ‘guides the composer’s work throughout’, through a ‘gradual, “clarifying” process’ of ‘discovery’ (1999: 35–36). However, even that sense of ‘clarification’ would imply a final feeling of achievement at having reached a solution to a problem. Though the latter is certainly something I believe I have experienced in some way working on other pieces, in this case, I feel it simply never came. As I believe my journal entries indicate, I felt as though I got the piece ‘wrong’ far too many times to experience anything more than relief that I didn’t need to continue working on a particular problem, and could move onto the next. So rather than emerging victorious from the compositional journey, my main sense now is more that I simply survived it, but not unscathed: in the process I cannot help but feel I did lose something of my previous, more optimistic, creative self.
Furthermore, to make this story a more personal one, I also now find it impossible to reflect on the piece (and its portrayal of grief and consolation) without linking it to the tragic suicide of my great friend and colleague, the composer Alastair Putt, who attended the premiere and joined me, the performers, close friends and family in a small gathering after the concert, just two days before his death. So while my overriding impression is that it was very hard work to achieve what I did (which is far from a perfect realization of my vision; I am a terrible perfectionist), and as grateful as I am for the immense privileges of a major commission for the BBC Proms for such huge forces, taken in balance, I cannot help but suspect I might have lost as much as I gained in the process, and that things will never feel quite the same going forward. I do not feel I am the hero of this story of the piece’s creation nor, indeed, do I believe that artists are heroes at all: we are simply practitioners grappling with life, work and the many highs, lows, but also feelings of ambivalence, ambiguity, often even confusion and disillusionment that they bring. Or, framed a little more positively, perhaps this newfound attitude also represents the attainment of a certain kind of realism and maturity that comes through greater experience that may prove beneficial in the long run, even if some of my memories in relation to the work will forever remain ambivalent and unresolved.
________
Looking beyond myself, and as for any artist, critical responses and feedback can act as a grounding (even humbling) antidote to any sense of heroism that can arise after a successful premiere (although I take care to avoid engaging too seriously with those that I believe to have misunderstood the premise of the work and judged it on terms other than its own). One extensive review for the Musical Quarterly, while praising the pictorialism of the work expressed a significant reservation in its final paragraph, noting: ‘[t]here’s a lot of text to get through and Pearl sometimes feels hampered’ (Stein 2022: 54). To a degree, I suspect that this assessment was partly due to the nature of it being a first performance, which owing to the practical realities, was rehearsed by the orchestra on a very tight schedule, and while impressive and incredibly accurate, was perhaps a little tentative. If it does prove possible in future to get further performances, especially if they are repeated, I suspect that might permit the orchestra to gain a stronger sense of the work’s shape. (This has certainly been the case in other works of mine, and certainly not a negative reflection on the orchestral players; it is a mere practical reality of the current professional landscape of the classical music industry in the UK and its effects on the performance of new works.)
Happily, a number of reviewers did comment on the use of topical gestures in the score (even if they were cued to a degree by my programme notes and interviews with BBC Radio 3; see Jeal 2022; Stein 2022; Westbrook 2022). Indeed, items in the bulleted list covered above in my Storytelling Aims were discussion points in many of the published and private responses I received. Moreover, it was of great value to me personally when Christopher Wintle contacted me after the premiere of Pearl to say ‘the piece has a deep harmonic Zusammenhang’.2 As I noted in my reply, I believe I owe much of my understanding of long-range harmonic structure to Wintle and his work, and therefore considered this significant praise, particularly as he sensed this from listening to the broadcast only (private email to the author, 12 August 2022, quoted with permission).
Rather than attempting to ‘defend’ the work, however, I would simply posit that a faster moving, musically more dramatic score would have been a different piece, and one that conveyed a story other than that of the poem. Indeed, while Stein states early on the poem is ‘profoundly undramatic’ in nature, he acknowledges that my work is capable of ‘lightness, surprise and deftness’ in other cases (Stein 2022: 53–54). Put simply then, I would argue that Pearl was conceived quite deliberately as a peculiar and subtle musical world that responds as closely as I felt possible to the nuances of its hauntingly beautiful yet strange poetic text, which on the face of it, involves no more than a mournful protagonist falling asleep and waking up transformed by an otherworldly dream. Whatever its resonances for me and others now, it is an important milestone in my ongoing creative journey and has resulted in several significant artistic discoveries in terms of my work in the area of musical narrative and broader understanding of myself as a practitioner.
Lastly, as a researcher-practitioner, I hope that sharing the piece and unpacking its creative development here might encourage others to respond and reflect on its resonances and implications for themselves, and through its methodological eclecticism provide the type of ‘new story’ that Stewart advocates to ‘uncover, record, interpret and position, from an insider’s perspective and experience, the processes [I] use within the context of contemporary practices in the field’, as a ‘portrait-of-self that mirrors and situates [my] experience’ (2007: 126). (As noted in the Introduction, my application of narratological and adaptive analytical techniques may have wider theoretical and practical applications, especially in collaborative contexts, as a means to articulate and negotiate narrative thinking across varied media.) Above all, I hope that, alongside other instances in this journal, it sheds some light on one of the many diverse ways of being an artistic practitioner today, and within my own field, that it might encourage colleagues to consider doing the same, as P-R in Composition continues to establish itself.3